David McElroy

It was a year ago today when cancer took Lucy away from me. I still miss her every day.

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been a full year. If you’ve known me for long, though, you know how much all of my furry friends mean to me — and how much this special dog meant.

In this three-minute video, I reflect on what this dear girl meant to me.

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I’m not trying to change your mind anymore — about anything.

There was a time when I was naive enough — and arrogant enough — to believe I was smart enough to convince anybody that I was right about anything. I thought I could lay out airtight arguments that any reasonable person would agree with.

I thought I could change anybody’s mind. And I thought it was important to “convert” others to whatever I believed. I was a fire-and-brimstone preacher evangelizing for my holy cause.

I was wrong about all of that.

My goals are simpler today. All I really want is to help you feel something.

I want you to feel something that is real and true.

I want to help you feel something human — and I want it to be something that you know in your own heart is the truth. What you do with that is up to you. Even if I’m right about the things I believe — and I do believe I’m right, of course — it’s not really my business what you decide to believe.

I want to help you get in touch with what it means to be alive — not as a consumer or a worker or a voter or a cog in a machine.

I want you to feel what it means to be a fully conscious human being.

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I made a few fun images over the weekend of my current cats as Halloween characters. Alex was a vampire. Meg was a spell-casting witch. And Oliver was originally a ghost, since his light gray fur seemed appropriate for that.

But as I tried to get to sleep Sunday night, it suddenly hit me that I needed to make a Halloween short about one of the cats I’ve lost as a ghost. And as the “alpha feline” of all time in my house, Merlin was the obvious choice.

So this is a one-minute short that I enjoyed creating Monday.

I started with original photos of Merlin and then designed scenes in a spooky mansion for him to roam as the home he was reclaiming. OpenAI’s image generator then helped me make reference images of those scenes and I edited them in Photoshop

The scenes were animated — in very rudimentary ways — through a video service called Runway. I wrote the script and had the narration created in ElevenLabs. The music came from Soundstripe, which is the service I use for all my music needs.

The titles were created in Photoshop and then everything was assembled in iMovie on my MacBook. (This was simple enough that Final Cut Pro would have been overkill.)

I had great fun making it, so I hope it will make a few people smile. And if the moon is full for Halloween this week, don’t be surprised to see Merlin back for a visit.

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